I agree with cfm. The sample catalogs have always been easy to set up
and have hidden the complexity under the hood and showed what MV or
IC really can do at the first glance. I think that somehow this was
purposefully designed that way. A little trick to get people hooked. :-)
Basically there are two szenarios where using IC comes into play.
Either you are an e-commerce consultant and you want to make money
building sites for your customers based on IC. IC right now caters very
well to this group. At least it should, because as cfm said, you
should be capable of figuring out how the tag syntax works together
with Perl and be capable of do any possible customization with the
platform possible. For those people neither the many example catalogs,
nor the dense documentation should be a hurdle. As they get the platform
for free, all extra help they might need, they still can get for free
would be over this list, and if they need more help than this they
should also pay for it, or make a decision like Mark did to work
independently on his own solution.
The other szenario is that someone wants to use the IC platform for
himself, his own project, business or whatever and is not in the
business to serve others as consultant and developer.
a. he doesn't know enough, but HAS money -> He should hire a
consultant
b. he doesn't know enough and has NO money (or very little) ->
b1.) he has time to learn -> eventually he will profit using IC.
b2.) he has no time to learn -> tough luck, he needs another
IC package, the out-of-the-box basic package, a lite package with
a clearly explained subset of tags and features, which are as
easy to understand as HTML or XML, for which he should pay a
price.
b3.) he has difficulties to learn -> he should run away as fast
as he can and do something totally different and forget all
about IC - :-) There is more to life than an e-commerce site.
The only thing RedHat has really to decide, is how to split the whole
platform in an enduser friendly IC-light version and a developer IC-heavy
-duty version and how they want to distribute and deliver these two
services, products and may be different set of documentations, and for
what price. Or if they really want to serve both groups. May be they
explicitly just want to cater to the .nix cutting-edge-super-duper
developing-geek-nerd-master. Being RedHats that might very well be the
case.
The whole issue is also not new. This is as old as MiniVend itself, it
has just grown into greater complexity and is thusly more important to
make a decision about.
BF